LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND GOATS
Chapter 5
Sunday 18 June London Rotten Borough of Lower Springwood
Halfway to Heaven [or the other place] with a mass of the Lard’s holy spirits.
The Rarely Reverend Malcolm Green’s career as a crusted cleric of the cloth, by virtue of a Third scraped in Divinity, bottoming with a mission to the backfields of Springwood, with the proviso to move in a mysterious way among the Lard’s black sheep, a task under-crooked with the merest wafer of relish, proselytising Britain’s most celebrated acid-bath specialist and the prison feral cat.
The fruit of the Reverend’s labours shines on show at Christmas when acid-man crooks arm with axe-man for the prison passion play, watched by the Mayor (Grand Water Vole) and the Chief Constable (Grand-Pooh-Bear), and last season they had packed in the Great and the Good and all went swimmingly.
Hand on heart, the Reverend’s greatest killing to date — persuading Kelvin the Cannibal to partake of the Flesh and the Wine. But best be on your toes when addressing Kelvin lest as he throws a roving eye over your person he is sizing you up to be his next plat du jour.
The Reverend well-versed with the sporting section of the Sunday Trumpet, feet up in the vestry, and well-rehearsed with his seventeenth sherry when rudely interrupts the bell for the start of the Lard’s Sunday shift. The body of his sermon lost in the basement bar of Lower Springwood’s Lapdancers A-Go-Go. No great shakes. A Lifetime wasted promoting the Lard, predicting the return of the Lard, or passing over the Lard’s predilection for killing sprees.
Only the hymns to be cherry-picked. Should they should plump for 123 Onward Christian Soldiers? Or 69 Gird Up thy Loins? And when the lost sheep of Lower Springwood open their hearts to the light, perhaps 121 How Lush is My Valley? Yes. A good healthy singsong is just what the Doctor orders — or would if they could keep a Doctor for longer than the Lard’s Prayer — charged to raise the vocal cords and clear the rafters.
The Reverend lets slip from his sticky fingers a losing lottery ticket fluttering to stony ground — for yet again the Lard sees fit to bestow the winnings from the Lottery on an unworthy sinner — one of those mysteries of Life the Reverend simply can’t fathom. Like why the Lard plagues His sinners with the Spice Girls. Or why el Presidenté Bliar pretends to be honest and competent.
Sod ’em. Make ’em wait. The prisoners wholly a pain in the ass.
The Reverend parts a sea of red velvet curtain and slips into the factory of his labours. Holy Moses! Never in a month of mouldy memories can he resurrect a nightmare like it. The Sunday with the special slides on the perils of fornication had swollen the show to a merry half-dozen. Always will the House of the Lard reserve a welcome to its black sheep but this flock fidget like Philistines on the back row, front row, and on each other’s laps.
‘I can’t tell you how heart-warming to see so many of you for the first time,’ lies the Reverend openly and clutching the lectern for support. ‘And I look forward to some of you — hick! — bearing your tonsils for the choir. We’ve no shortage of sopranos. But we are in need of barbitones and trippers. Ahem.’
Onward Christian Soldiers doesn’t march exactly, more a staccato off to war.
‘I remember what I was thinking when I was your age. This God fellow. Is He one of us, eh? Is He really the sort you’d want to have a beer with down at your local? A no-nonsense racing man — can you lend me a tenner? — with a bottle of brown ale thrown in t’boot? I can tell you, my children, the answer is both yes and no. When you see your horse trail in last, yes, God is responsible. But no. God does not have an account with William Hill. Or Ladbrokes. Berk!’
Soul flushed with a spirit of the Lard and press-ganging his sermon. ‘Be not a goat. Chaff! Losing slips blown on the wind ...’
Mad bleating eyes bulge from a sea of fornicating flesh.
‘... Hide not your burning bushels. Be not a foolish virgin unprepared for the coming of the Lard ...’
Tosa-the-Mad-Fighting-Sheep bleating to Goebbels alongside, ‘Ewe what?’
‘Some virgin has got chaff.’
‘Sssssssh!’ fills the wooden hut from the blue screw Mellor, charged to enforce the Gospel of the Lard.
‘Give God a good home,’ lauds the Reverend Green. ‘God is omnipresent, omniscient, omnivorous, omnipotent ...’
Tosa-the-Mad-Fighting-Sheep rock-steady and told to be on the lookout for the Reading of the Bands. ‘Come again?’
‘Omnipotent?’ Goebbels awaiting the normal wrath of the Lard to come on top. ‘Means He’s very potent. Got lots of kids.’
‘No. Omnivorous. Thrash metal outfit from Darlington?’
‘Beats me.’
‘And these Vestal Virgins we see about us,’ entreats the rocking Reverend — ‘hick! — How — how fit are they to enter the Kingdom of Everlasting Happiness? Eh? Come and sit on your Uncle Malcolm’s knee ... Where was I? Har!’
(murmur murmur)
‘Repeat after me, Our Farter who farts in Heaven, Hollow be thy name …’
‘Ooo, I know this one,’ rejoices Tosa.
‘Sssshhh!’
‘Now where was I? Hick! … ‘Put ye your new wine into old bottles. Yea. Give that which is holy unto the dogs. Cast ye …’
‘I’m fed up with this,’ foaming Tosa at the mouth of the Mountain. ‘What did he call us?’ The red mist of Babylon descending.
‘Dogs,’ confirms Goebbels. ‘And swine.’
‘Armageddon!’
Never in living memory have the lost sheep of Lower Springwood reacted with such liverish irreverence to one of his sermons. Rabid fighting sheep cry havoc and let slip from their traps wreak Hell. A sacrificial altar of flailing limbs, flashing flesh, the alarm-bell trumpeting the walls of Jericho, and up with the bench and through the stained-glass window it smashes.
Oh my God.
Pandemonium.
Flashes fast an arm.
The punch hits him square like a lash of lightning, and the rest is silence.
Apart from the voices. Of red devils.
And the repeating winning combinations of future jackpot rollovers revolving.
***
Hell he is no coward.
He is the General — General Christopher Robin Chopper — a military man of five-foot-four, flash-red hair, freckles, best blade against the thigh, personal attaché to the Field Marshal Jason Knees, the very bestest friend he has in the whole wide world. For when that secret job is kindled — with any kind of explosives or weapons you care to mention — then the General is your man. And from the eyrie of a cardboard box under the rail of the Fours, the General espies every key movement down on the jungle floor of the Ones.
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir of dickies arrayed on rafters under the cupola, made rebellious by the fantastic blood and cabbage feast belching from the kitchens, and alert the General to the End of the World.
The General counting out the big-bellied bully-beefs, hymn books under their arms, pushing the bully in front through the guillotine of the Great Gate. No stranger sight in Christendom than a Nazi or Cliff Richard at prayer.
And when the black-ball Nazi squad descend on the Ones, brandishing ear buds, toothbrushes and toilet brushes, the General espies them stumbling upon a single Screw — Clarke — caught snoozing and dragged bang-to-rights from the suite of staff rest rooms.
The red-armband-trustee squad concocting a feast in the kitchens for the End of the World scatter like cockroaches, alarmed by the ear-throbbing bell and the assured gentle missionary work of an imminent inrush of riot-squad Screws. Peter doors throughout the block slam much like the palace doors of European Heads of State in the face of el Presidenté Bliar as he slithers on his Summer Progress.
General Chopper disapproving from his private box the construction of a Tower of Babel against the Great Gate of bedframes, chairs, the Governor’s table, filing cabinets, enormous cans of fruit from the kitchens, crafted to resist the most determined truncheon-carrying party-pooper or Jehovah’s Witness.
‘We can be heroes,’ croons the brave General crawling along the landing of the Fours. ‘We can be heroes for just one day.’ Around the iron post, left, right, left right, down the iron hill step by step. The boring bell boom-crashing the ear-drums, swing hip, lift knee, concentrate, you are the General, a military man. For when the chips are down, you will never be the one to let the side down. And with the taking of each iron step, frame by frame opens the battlefield of the Ones fair prey to the eagle eyes of the General, when with one small step for a sparrow, one giant leap for a friend in need, the General senses that at the End of the World he is the last man standing.